Not Even A Teenager Yet, Mark Zuckerberg Built A Chat Service For His Father's Dental Practice

Zuckerberg gave the commencement speech at Harvard, his alma mater.

Well before Facebook, its users numbering in billions, and social media glory, Mark Zuckerberg was building social tech products. When he was just 12, not even a teenager yet, he made something called ZuckNet, a chat service for his family.

As reported by Recode, the Facebook co-founder spoke about his childhood coding exploits in a podcast called Master of Scale.

"Growing up, one of the neat things was that [my dad's] dental office was actually connected to our home," Zuckerberg recalled. "The dentists and hygienists needed to share data on the patients. So, I built a system where he could communicate with folks across rooms, and also communicate with me and my sisters upstairs. And, I called it ZuckNet."

Zuckerberg said that this was a fun first social engagement product for him, with many more to follow. Eventually, ZuckNet was replaced by then popular, AOL chat. During those early years, Zuckerberg even built social computer games such as Digital Snowball Fight.

The Facebook head also said that, originally, he didn't want to move to Silicon Valley. He and his co-founder Dustin Mokovitz moved for a summer to work on Facebook and eventually ended up staying.